Fanfair

The Week Chicago Died

If you want to know what it felt like to live through 1968, America’s annus horribilis, this is the place to start. Chicago 10 opens with a hollow-eyed, dead-faced Lyndon Johnson announcing another call-up of soldiers for the war in Vietnam—a cause he knew was doomed. What that war did to his country, and what lengths other Americans went to stop it, is the ultimate subject of this remarkable documentary, directed by Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture) and produced by Graydon Carter (*Vanity Fair’*s editor and, it’s true, my boss). Their film interweaves two related narratives: the story of the angry anti-war protests that shook the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, climaxing with police riots that left demonstrators beaten and bloodied, and the famously chaotic trial of the protests’ supposed ringleaders—the same Establishment-versus-dissenters clash re-staged as courtroom farce. Forsaking a nostalgia-inducing soundtrack (Eminem subs for Buffalo Springfield) and the distancing perspectives of talking, graying heads, Morgen plunges us into the anarchic center of events with an immediacy—history rubbed raw—that’s rare in a film made 40 years after the fact. Trial transcripts, amusing and appalling in equal measure, are brought to life with a motion-capture animation technique that takes getting used to but proves effective, aided by a cast of first-rate vocal talents, among them Hank Azaria, Liev Schreiber, and Mark Ruffalo. But the real star of Chicago 10 is the editing job done on hundreds of hours of news footage of the protests. With the geographical and political clarity of a great war movie, Chicago 10 shows what amounts to two opposing armies maneuvering for advantage, both sides—the protesters weren’t innocents—bent on some kind of awful catharsis. Morgen makes you feel the queasy anxiety coursing through the streets: it’s the sensation of America rending itself in two. Current relevance T.B.D.